In the design and manufacture of electronic devices and systems, it is now common practice to utilize electronic components which are directly mounted on printed circuit (PC) boards; the boards themselves are subsequently mounted in the system or device housing. This scheme tends to reduce the complexity and cost of assembly, and to simplify servicing procedures. Typical components of the kind referred to above are fabricated with a number of straight mounting leads or "legs" extending outwardly from the component. These legs are inserted into slots in the PC board so that the component is mounted essentially flat against the PC board. However, in numerous applications there has arisen the requirement that at least some components be mounted at an angle relative to the surface of the PC board. For example, in some light emitting diode (LED) optical displays, the LED chips must be mounted at an angle to the printed circuit board in order to provide appropriate viewing of the display. Typically, this is now done by mounting the LED chips on a separate circuit board which is tilted at an angle to the main circuit board. Harnesses or other flexible cable must then be used to electrically interconnect the two circuit boards, all of which entails undesirable assembly complexity and costs.
In order to provide such angular mounting some prior art dual inline integrated circuit (IC) sockets are presently manufactured in which the mounting leads each have an angular bend. Thus, when the leads are inserted into a PC board, the component will be tilted relative to the PC board at an angle determined by the angular bend in the leads. It is a disadvantage of such packages, however, that only one specific mounting angle is available for each package; thus, a large number of different packages, each having a different angular bend in the leads, must be manufactured and stocked if it is desired to mount components at differing angles.